Cycling group puts its spin on Valentine's Day

Dave Ford, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Friday, February 6, 2004

There are many reasons to ride a bicycle in San Francisco. There is the whole wind-in-the hair, save-the-environment thing. There is the fact that bike riders often get to places faster than those in a car. Plus, there is the pleasant possibility of befriending strangers on bikes at stoplights.

But true bicyclists will tell you there is one reason above all others to pedal with mettle around town: Doing so is entirely erotic.

That's the push behind the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition's third Pre- Valentine's Day Love on Wheels bash, on Wednesday at Cafe Du Nord on Market Street. The event raises money for the coalition, a 33-year-old nonprofit advocacy group.

Josh Hart, the group's program director, notes that bicyclists tend to be fit.

"Bicycling is sexy," Hart, 28, says. "This (party) is an opportunity to kind of showcase that, and to bring bicyclists together."

The blowout boasts local talents such as the hard-rocking band the Vikter VZ Experience, cheeky chanteuse Kitten on the Keys and lyricist and singer Tom Orr. The McGuire Cycling Team, a professional agglomeration of hard-calved San Francisco racers, will make an appearance.

The event likely to be considered the evening's crowning moment, however, will be the Celebrity Dating Game, which will have male-female, male-male and female-female rounds.

As on the television show, which was hosted by local radio personality Jim Lange and ran on ABC for 17 years in the 1960s and '70s, a bright-eyed bachelor or bachelorette will question three prospective dates hidden from view. The bachelor(ette) will select a mate for a date, and they will go out to a dinner or movie donated by local businesses.

"By bike, of course," Hart says.

One of the celebrity bachelors is Michael Soldier, a licensed massage therapist who moved to San Francisco from Provincetown, Mass., three years ago. In his drag persona, Precious Moments, Soldier was selected as Miss Trannyshack 2001 -- chief drag queen at the city's bawdy weekly drag performance night at the Stud bar. Soldier also has starred in more than a dozen male-male adult films produced by San Francisco's Raging Stallion Studios. (He wrote, co-directed and starred in his latest, "A Porn Star Is Born," a spoof on the industry.)

Soldier will pick from a crop of willing males and says he already has questions in mind. Few, as it turns out, can be printed in a family newspaper, but each carries not a little wit. Answering his own query about what is done with the "extra" hand while a person pleasures himself, Soldier, 36, quips: "I dust."

Mehler, 40, lives with Taylor in Diamond Heights. She rides 250 to 400 miles a week, including a twice-weekly 80-mile round trip to Palo Alto, where she works in a bicycle shop. She notes that male bicycle racers tend to have ultra-lean, even underdeveloped upper bodies.

"But from the waist down," she adds with a laugh, "they're studs."

If so, they are studs who, in San Francisco at least, have access only to piecemeal bike lanes on the city's streets. Sometime this year, the Bike Coalition will present a new bike plan to the Board of Supervisors that will include a proposal for a citywide grid of bike routes.

"We're trying to connect these separate pieces of bike lanes that we have now into a coordinated, cohesive network," Hart says.

That's another reason for bicyclists and their friends, loved ones -- and admirers -- to support the Bike Coalition by checking out Love on Wheels. Well, that and the fitness that riding enhances, which Hart says makes bikes so much more attractive than, say, motor vehicles.

"Sitting in traffic in a car and having your waistline increase," he says, "it's not a very sexy thing."

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